Spider-Man takes on a cross-franchise rogues gallery in the greatest-hits sequel No Way Home
From the Spider-Verse tumbles a sinister five of Sam Raimi and Marc Webb villains
Film Reviews Spider-Man
This review contains minor spoilers (including a revelation of the main villains) from the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home.
With each passing year, the Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi look more and more like glorious anomalies. To watch them today is to stare into a whole other dimension of soulfully eccentric comic-book adaptations. Among the various out-of-vogue pleasures of Raimi’s Spider-Man films (especially the first two) are wonderfully hammy villains played by world-class actors. The CGI may now appear dated, but the real special effect of these early-2000s blockbusters was and remains the scenery chewing: the cackle and crooked grin of a slumming Oscar winner, the tortured megalomania of a West End stage veteran refusing to be upstaged by his mechanical limbs.
In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Willem Dafoe and Alfred Molina reprise these iconic roles, returning to respectively portray gliding mad billionaire The Green Goblin and the multi-armed mad scientist Doctor Octopus. They aren’t playing new versions of the heavies. They aren’t even playing older versions of them. Digital makeover aside, they are roughly as we remember them from the Raimi movies. That’s less a spoiler than the whole hook of this latest trip to the endlessly chugging Marvel Cinematic Universe: Having exhausted the Avengers novelty of mixing and matching characters from its own vast ensemble, the company is now plucking them from separate continuities.
The Goblin and Doc Ock are only a portion of the rogues gallery Peter Parker (Tom Holland) squares off against in No Way Home. His problems also include an amorphous sandman, a talking reptile, and the human battery Electro (Jamie Foxx). Those last two hail from yet another cinematic universe—the one that cast Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man, just a few years after Tobey Maguire hung up the spandex. (Emma Stone aside, these movies inspire, and deserve, much less rapturous remembrance than Raimi’s.)
No Way Home picks up right where Far From Home left off, with Peter reeling from the public revelation of his secret identity. The fallout has scuttled not just his dreams of MIT attendance but also those of his best friend, Ned (Jacob Batalon), and his new girlfriend, MJ (Zendaya). For a while, the movie remains in the charmingly low-key register of Holland’s previous two solo adventures in the suit, which at their best played like teen comedies with some middling superhero action running in their margins. The stakes here feel similarly scaled to the divided priorities of an adolescent Avenger; college admission woes are as pressing as any Manhattan rumble.
It’s when Peter convinces the sorcerer Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to fix his problems with a spell—which of course goes horribly awry— that the movie begins yanking foes from defunct franchises into the fold. This is, again, just a new variation on the Marvel business model of extended universing. Which isn’t to deny the fun No Way Home sometimes scavenges from the synergistic strategy. Dafoe and Molina both look vaguely uncanny, their faces smoothed through the still-imperfect black magic of deaging tech. But maybe that’s fitting for how their villains are presented: as phantoms blinked from one reality to another at their moment of fatal defeat. Anyway, it’s nice to watch these two finely cooked hams drum up some of that old cartoon theatricality, even as the movie keeps its sinister five on a surprisingly tight leash.
No Way Home is messier than the average adventure off the MCU assembly line. It has more in common with Raimi’s overcrowded Spider-Man 3 than just a certain sentient storm of minerals (played by… well, it’s not entirely clear, even after a climactic desanding). At times, it feels like there are as many movies competing for screentime here as there are villains, with returning director Jon Watts attempting the herculean (or just Peter Parkerian) task of balancing a large cast of old friends and family with a new roster of adversaries with whom the audience is assumed to be familiar. The tone veers all over the map, turning the supervillains into quippy frenemies one minute, plunging Peter into narrative and meteorological darkness the next. The whole thing is pasted together with a volume of magical and scientific hooey (and MacGuffins) that’s high even by the standards of this extended franchise.
Will Tom Holland ever get a Spider-Man movie that’s all his own? His run in the role has been categorized by looming mentor figures and larger MCU maintenance; if Homecoming (and, to a lesser extent, Far From Home) doubled as Iron Man movies, this one feels like half a Doctor Strange story, adding a skirmish in the Inception–ish mirror dimension to an already crowded two-and-a-half hours of plot and spectacle. Here, Holland’s winning coming-of-age arc is further overshadowed by the aspirations to a live-action Spider-Verse, pulling in characters from different series. At least the script, by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, folds the borrowed bads into a dilemma that feels catered to the earnest empathy of Holland’s version of Parker: Can he save these displaced monsters and mistakes from their grim destiny?
The paradoxical truth is that No Way Home’s extended exercise in franchise-agnostic fan service is at once an ominous precedent for future event movies and an at-times rather poignant gimmick. There’s something oddly moving about the film’s attempts to tie up the loose ends of two aborted series that came before its own. The crass crowd-pleasing of Marvel dumping action figures from different lines into the same playpen is partially redeemed by the emotional closure some of the returning cast members carve out for themselves… even those who seem to have forgotten exactly how to play the roles they occupied so many years earlier.
Suffice to say, No Way Home hits its hoot-and-holler beats about as skillfully as Endgame did. There are moments here that will probably inspire comparable choruses of applause; by opening a wormhole into the multiverse of past Spider-Man movies, Marvel and Sony have made something like an all-purpose Spider-Man sequel, shrewdly designed to hit a whole range of nostalgia centers. Thankfully, that exploitation of IP and fond memories alike includes a platform for some fine character actors to get back into the malevolent mojo of their past contributions to the genre. If only the film lifted some of the oddball visual splendor of Raimi’s trilogy while it was rounding up its most memorable antagonists. Here’s hoping the guy’s superhuman eccentricity survives next year’s plummet into the Marvel industrial complex.
393 Comments
even those who seem to have forgotten exactly how to play the roles they occupied so many years earlierI am really, really hoping this means Alfred Molina loses track of his character halfway through and just goes full Fiddler.
Tom Holland confuses this movie with Uncharted and starts murdering dozens of people at the slightest provocation.
Don’t forget about Aunt May and Happy. I understand they are ripped apart from their love’s embrace into thin pieces of human flesh, as the Kelpien rage monster brothersister duo Saru and Siranna are pissed at being ripped from their universe once again. ‘I Am Iron Man’(snap) – Yeah, fuck you Tony Stark, they’re coming for you next in Phase V.
Willem Dafoe forgets what role he’s playing, and convinces Peter to stay up all night with him, drinking and telling rambling tall tales about life as a lighthouse keeper. Peter Parker wakes up hanging from the top of a building by a spider web thread, with a seagull pecking at him.
“Why’d ye spill yer web fluid, Parker?”
I’d pay extra if Dafoe would just show up as the guy from The Lighthouse, beard and all.
I’d prefer Erotic Mermaid Dafoe.
I feel like that character us actually who Dafoe is in real life, and Willem Dafoe the actor is just a character he plays.
It’s funny because it’s true. Nathan Drake is an explorer and mass murderer.Uncharted is the only game series that has given me kill fatigue. I get to the point where I stop because “why do I have to kill a small nation’s worth of people for this artifact?!”
Oh trust me, Doc Ock has a lot on his plate. Like fucking Aunt May…
This isn’t the type of fiddling I was picturing, but I can dig it.
Well, how could he resist? She’s so smoking hot in that picture. Really, they shouldn’t have flattered her so!
They obviously got a good deal on those flowers, so she had to use ALL OF THEM.
She looks like Brian Williams.
Loved this story line. Also can we bring back The Spider Mobile?
We got the Thanos-copter twice over, so anything’s possible.
Have you seen traffic in New York? It’s be faster for him to walk.
In fact in the previous issue Spidey said “I can get around NY faster on my webbing.” Peter was no fool.
If Aunt May looked like Marissa Tomei, who could blame him?
If I were the officiant my reaction would probably be more like “with this ring, I thee…WHAT THE FUCK?!” and I certainly would immediately identify the white sticky substance suddenly covering my bible as a “web.”
“Come to think of it, why did I think it was perfectly normal to officiate a wedding where the groom has four robot arms coming out of his back?”
You don’t know how correct you are.
Looks like she’s marrying Pete Rose…
I’m pretty sure that’s just angry Elton John.
“Doc Ock-et Man, burning out his fuse up here alone…”
I don’t want to detract from the writing of the MCU – churning out hundreds of pages of more-or-less coherent material within the tight parameters of a mega-franchise is a real feat. But nobody – nobody – working for Marvel Studios will ever top “With this ring, I thee – WEB?” I was just about to commend the MCU writers for not indulging the whole “Spider-Man is dreaming / thinks he’s going crazy” trope from the 60s and 70s, but then I remembered that scene in Far Frome Home where I almost fell asleep.
I have never, ever, EVER understood how May is SO OLD and decrepit. She’s never been said to be his GREAT-Aunt, just his aunt. So apparently Peter’s grandma had two daughters thirty years apart.Marisa Tomei is 50ish, it makes a lot more sense. And if you don’t want to play her as hot, Spider-Verse kept her grey but badass and fit. Aunt May as the 70/80 year old covered in wrinkles is so… *shudder*
I mean, I know several siblings more than 20 years apart, and maybe Peter’s mom waited until she was close to 40 to have Peter. So, if you squint, it works. Especially since 60 was a lot older in the 1960s than it is now.
I have an aunt and uncle 16 years apart with three siblings in between.
The Wayans family is a good example of this: the eldest was born in the 50’s and the youngest was born in the 70’s. Same mother.
[Pushes glasses up nose] Ben Parker was Peter’s father’s brother, so May COULD have been significantly older, but Ben and May have always been represented as not so far apart in age.Also, Tomei is 57, which reminds us once again: nobody makes fun of good cosmetic surgery.
I wouldn’t put it past the filmamkers to have a Otto-May flirting scene, just as a reference to this. Otto’s wife (an underdeveloped character) in Spider-Man 2 was also played by a too-good-for-this actress with a real Marisa Tomai vibe, and with Thanos’s helicopter and Frog Thor making appearances in Loki, the MCU is in full easter-egg/inside-joke mode these days.I do miss when Marvel was just proud/embarrassed enough of its source material to re-invent it for the screen in clever, logical ways. But I suppose this descent into a self-referential meta circus mirrors what happened in comics.
Is it just me or does Aunt May look like an aging Wolverine with a crown of roses?
I can’t not think of Scott Aukerman and PFT riffing on the priest’s line now, thanks CBB best of from a few years ago!
Still hoping that, in the next Into the Spider-Verse movie, we get confirmation of something that maybe was implied when Miles’ universe’s May called Olivia “Doc Ock” Octavius “Liv” with a certain ahem-ahem familiarity.
With all that green in the background, I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t going to sing one of Elphaba’s bangers.
I thought The Fiddler was a Batman villain…
“FIDDLE ME THIS, BATMAN!”*strikes up “The Devil Went Down To Georgia*
THE SMILE! That was wonderful. Thank you. =)
Holland did mention in a recent interview that it took Molina several tries to say Peter’s name the way he did in SM2.
It’s weird that, for all the effort to make Molina and DaFoe look like their old selves, they got Doc Ock’s hair so wrong.
Does it end with an exhausting long, unfulfilling fight scene with questionable CGI like almost every recent comic book movie? Somehow I feel like I already know the answer.
If the movie is reviving old favourites from the 2000s, it should definitely bring back fan favourite Big Pillar Of Light In The Sky for a cameo.
A Big Pillar Of Light? Without a Floating Trash Ring? Blasphemy!
Despite all of the rumors that they’d snuck him onto the set to film a cameo, Floating Trash Ring is retired, living comfortably in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just as his posts on social media said.
“I’ve never seen ‘Suicide Squad’, which by all reports is dreadful. But I have seen the beach house it paid for, and that is fantastic.” – Floating Trash Ring
And we’ll need the hero’s logo to appear on fire for no reason while we’re at it.
2000s? That trope was still showing up in stuff like 2015s Fant4stic. It never went away.
Your point is valid, you don’t need to make up pretend movie titles to prove it.
I genuinely hope whoever made up that title no longer works in the film industry.
The person who came up with that title was, you guessed it, Frank Stalone.And so you got your wish!
That’s more of a 2010s thing.
You’re FUN
Of course it does, just look at the picture of the fight on some freeway that appears in this very review. It looks more like a video game cut scene than a movie.
Ever since the Matrix, big freeway fights are definitely A Thing That Must Appear in Every Action Movie.
Funny you should say that. It felt, most of the time, like this movie was conceived after one of the studio execs walked by one of their children playing the Spider-Man (PS4) title in the den. Such a similar sense of an overpacked experience.I didn’t have the same cynicism, though, as Dowd had. Will future movies glom onto the fan servicey aspects of this movie and milk them for all their worth? Nearly certainly, but this particular movie felt like it dug a bit deeper while mining the other franchises. It felt satisfying rather than patronizing. This movie is the first time in a while I’ve smiled ear to ear watching something MCU.
It makes me think of the (non-finale) runaway-train scene from Spider-Man 2, which is clearly full of CGI, but much more wisely used. I totally recognize how I was being manipulated in the end, too, with the passengers taking care of Spidey, but I fall for it every time. Let’s have more of that.
It helps that Raimi knows to edit around a weaker visual-effect properly.As for the passengers, “We won’t tell nobody” gets me every damn time.
One thing I realised a little while ago is that every Batman film and every Spider-Man film have one thing in common: someone finds out the hero’s secret identity at some point in the film. It may just be that in a lot of other superhero films the characters don’t have secret identities, so these two franchises are the only ones where it’s going to be a thing anyway, but I can’t think of a film in either series that’s skipped it.
I don’t think anyone new finds out who Batman is in The Dark Knight, but the pattern broadly holds.
Nope, the lawyer, Mr Reese, figures it out, and at one point threatens to reveal it on screen.
You’re forgetting the subplot where the accountant guy figures out his identity.
Yeah, it’s one of the things that’s awkward about the Holland version of Spider-Man is that the MCU has largely sidestepped the issue of secret identities. From Day 1, with Tony Stark announcing to the world that he was Iron Man, it was something that differentiated the MCU from most of the superhero stuff that came before (aside from every Batman and Spider-Man movie, Lois learns that Superman is Clark Kent in more than half of Superman’s movies). A lot of peoples complaints about the Holland Spider-Man come from the long period of the character’s history in the comics where even Spider-Man’s close friends and allies didn’t know who he was, which doesn’t really work in the MCU.
I think it works because, unlike everyone else in the MCU, Spidey is a teenager.
That’s not surprising given that of the Marvel and DC characters portrayed on film they are really the only two who have a “secret identity” that has any stakes worth preserving. Daredevil is another. The rest work under their actual names because of circumstance or being so god-level powerful that it doesn’t much matter.
One of the funniest bits in Mystery Men is that only Mr. Furious seems to have worked out that Lance Hunt is Captain Amazing, with The Shoveler acting as if MF is some kind of conspiracy-mongering kook: The Shoveler: Oh yeah, well, maybe if we had a billionaire benefactor like Lance Hunt, then we could afford some advertising.Mr. Furious: I think that’s because Lance Hunt is Captain Amazing.Blue Raja: Oh, here we go.Shoveler: Oh, don’t start that again! Lance Hunt wears glasses. Captain Amazing doesn’t wear glasses.Mr. Furious: [Long-suffering] He takes them off when he transforms.Shoveler: That doesn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t be able to see!
It never ceases to amuse me that Phil LaMarr is one of the passengers. He’s done so much stuff, and he’s just another subway passenger.
Then you don’t what CGI is. Much of the Spider-Man 2 CGI is literally creating actors who aren’t there. Which is why it looks so wonky. MCU CGI almost always is the actual actors, or stunt doubles, doing extensive wire work with CGI plates behind them. They are actually there, as opposed to being wholly CGI creations.
There’s dozens of shots in this movie of Spider-Man just doing nothing that are CGI.
That is so wackily untrue it’s stupefying.
Definitely true for a lot of these films LOL
It’s probably the big building under construction that’s in the trailers.
Precisely. Even though the script tells us that the fate of the universe hangs in the balance with every climax, it never feels like there are any real stakes. We all know how it’s going to end. Add to it the video game aesthetic that moves us even farther from any real emotional grounding, and I just don’t give a shit.
…it never feels like there are any real stakes.
And if there are any stakes, how is the audience supposed to know what those stakes are when every superpower is a deus ex machina?
Movies that had stakes so that you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting.
This is nearly my same comment in the relevant Scorcese threads, but THERE I’m a buzzkill. An accurate buzzkill.
The MCU movies use far, far more practical effects and wire work than any other action oriented films. There’s plenty of “making of’s” available now to see how they do it, and see that almost all the stuff people assume was CGI was all practical work.You clearly have no clue anyway, which is obvious when someone says “video game aesthetic.” I’d love for you to define that. I assume you mean activities that have no emotional stake, but that would mean you’re about two decades behind any video game and behind pretty much all MCU movies.
I’m sure the MCU uses plenty of practical effects, but when I watch their movies, they are overshadowed by all the stuff that could only be CGI.As for the “video game aethetic,” I mean hypersaturated colors, overuse of HDR and set design that’s beautifully detailed but doesn’t feel organic.Not sure why you’re being so hostile. No need to get your knickers in a twist, fanboy.
Actually, in an incredible turn of events, everyting Dowd discussed occurs in the first 20 minutes. The rest of the movie consists of Tom Holland and Wallace Shawn having dinner alone discussing life.
Every movie should feature a dinner scene with Wallace Shawn.Yes, I’m including porn in this.
All the porn I watch does. That way you know you are getting top shelf.
Sold!
Presumably they order some real steaks.
No instead it ends in an orgy set entirely to Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick (Part 2).
I’d watch the hell out of that.
It ends with Peter realizing that Aunt May was Keiser Soze the whole time.
What fascinated me about DUNE was the battle. Giant ships, thousands of soldiers, clashing…. and it just was. Music and beautiful shots everything was happening and nothing was happening and… it wasn’t boring. I thought at the time, “This should be boring, why isn’t it boring?” I am so used to MCU battles that I forgot what good storytelling is like.And now I want more of that.
There are such sequences, but they’re not the climax of the film. The climax is actually much more personal.
The “final battle” is packed full of quieter, emotional moments, so it wasn’t nearly so bad as some of the other Marvel CGI-fests have been.
Well i did not expect a B from Dowd at all. Feels like an A+. Feels like a “just go and see this right now”. It shall be done
I wonder what the insurance policy on Zendaya’s eyebrows is like.
Not to drag my own personal hangups but if big eyebrows on ladies are making a comeback I’m extremely down with that
If you’re an eyebrow man, you gotta check out this Netflix show called Emily in Paris.
Where dem Hemingway gals at??
Thick eyebrows have been back for the better part of a decade now, thanks to Cara Delevingne.
A mere pittance compared to whatever Cara Delevingne has to shell out every year.
LEAVEZENDAYA’SEYEBROWSALONE!
@Fever-Dog, all celebrities are completely hairless. They put the eyebrows on in editing to make sure the actors make the right facial expressions.
Arya Stark’s eyebrows had their own pov chapters.
$350 a month + six bottles of patchouli
So Thomas Haden Church and Rhys Ifans aren’t in the movie?
The review doesn’t say that – but the review also doesn’t confirm any casting that wasn’t seen in the trailers.
It’s a weird hedge to the reviewer to clearly say that the villain is shared with Maguire’s SM3 and yet not actually name him as Church.
sounds like it’s unclear, but not likely.
And again, what of the Dunst nipples, the greatest character in any Spidey movie?
Maybe just the CGI creations without requiring the actors for anything. *shrug*
They are. Don’t worry.
I can answer this question if you want a mild spoiler.
I want Holland and Maguire to do the upside down kiss with each other!
While Garfield just kind of stands to the side, nodding approvingly.
shooting his web on them 😉
Swap Maguire for Garfield, with Maguire doing his weird Spider Man 3 dance on the side, bad haircut and all.
The force ghosts of Uncle Ben (both versions) and Iron Man all high five and give a thumbs up.
They’re kissing. Everybody’s kissing.
Sequel: Spider Man: Oh Yeah. We’re Fucking. And Kayvan Novak plays whatever role he needs to in order to be in this!
He can play Morbius/Nandor but he drains all these spider men’s balls and not their blood!
No, you have to keep the “home” naming convention. So may I suggest, ‘Spider-Man: Gettin’ to Home Base’.
Spider-man: Home, coming.
*Nandor voice* Fucking guy
Now that you say it he could be a really good Kraven…
“Now dig on this.”
Dong out, naturally.
If Deadpool is showing up, let Ryan and Andrew kiss as well.
How about not?
Plus, it would kill the franchise.
Does this movie bring back Kirsten Dunst’s nipples?
I guess I imagined Maguire was in the trailer. Then again all the Spider Man actors have very similar facial features. Holland could push Durst out of the way before making out as well.
Dunst I mean. Write your own Durst jokes in there too. My tablet has.
This is, again, just a new variation on the Marvel business model of extended universing.
Ah there it is. For a moment I was worried this MCU review wouldn’t contain a hedging parenthetical about the Marvel formula with a slightly condescending tone.
Almost like it’s relevant or something…
Kevin Fiege isn’t gonna fuck you bro.Also, not a parenthetical!
It also isn’t really a hedge!
Parentheticals don’t require literal parentheses. It is a more of a nested thought between points.
Strunk and White’s Elements of Style isn’t gonna fuck you bro.
(But I agree with you that this kind of note in recent MCU reviews is getting a bit repetitive. SAUSAGE COMES IN ‘SAUSAGE SKIN’ SHOCKER: CONSUMERS AGHAST.)
Exactly this, nicely delivered in a proper parenthetical.I’m not against criticizing Marvel. There’s a lot to criticize there. But the fact that every review since EndGame is more about the “Marvel formula” and the state of the MCU than the actual movie in question is tedious and makes the reviews uninformative. AA’s review here is better than most of the recent MCU reviews: he actually gives an opinion on some performances (even though that’s reserved only for the former Raimi villains) and reluctantly hints that the movie has some pleasurable parts (a claim that’s repeated enough times, one might suppose the movie itself is pleasurable, overall?). That’s more substance than we’ve tended to get, lately, and it’s not a lot.I kind of wish that everyone who’s going to review an MCU movie would write a For Your Consideration with their full takedown of the Marvel, Disney, and the Cinematic Universe (most of them wouldn’t have to write anything new, since they’ve probably already written a suitable thinkpiece on the topic at some point over the last decade), and then just link that, maybe with a short excerpt, at the top of their review, like the COVID disclaimer that used to run on top of all movies released in theaters earlier in the pandemic. And then, with objections to the larger MCU out of the way, maybe the reviewer might feel free to just write about the movie in question, without falling back on the crutches of invoking the “Marvel industrial complex,” as if that alone was a suitable description of what’s right or wrong with a movie.
You can’t review these movies without talking about the state of the MCU because they no longer even attempt to stand on their own outside of the larger context of the MCU. There did exist a time when a Thor movie was a Thor movie and an Ant-Man movie was an Ant-Man movie and they could be reviewed as such, but that’s been stripped away piece by piece and the Tom Holland Spiderman series in particular has never really existed on its own.The most impressive thing about the MCU is how it’s managed to be a giant, interconnected multimedia series. That continuity obviously informs every single film that comes out, and the more ornate, complicated and broad the continuity gets, the more interwoven it gets with every individual story (practically by necessity). And because it’s so interwoven with everything, when the strings start to show they start to show in everything.Reviewing this as a single standalone story doesn’t make sense. It’s not how anybody at this point is going to see it, it’s not how it’s marketed, and it’s not how it was conceived.
Also, the machine is humming along at a meta level which is impossible to ignore. When casting leaks, frame-by-frame trailer speculation, and Phase release schedules are a keystone of the fandom hype machine, it seems patently unfair to say that a review/reviewer cannot comment on it.
If your theory were correct, you’d think that the most prominent of the “strings” in this movie—Dr. Strange—would merit more than two cursory mentions in the review. I honestly don’t think the reason that the recent reviews read as if the movie being reviewed was incidental is because of concerns about the interconnectedness and continuity of the MCU, since those things aren’t really being discussed in the review.
It would seem that you’re suggesting that the reviews themselves rely, for their content and context, on other pieces of media – like a “extended review universe,” if you will. Interesting concept.
Well, this review would be a lot cooler if at the end there was a stinger where Ignatiy showed up to talk to Dowd about the Inventory Initiative…
Maybe that’s because the movies seem to be more about the Marvel formula than anything else. I’ve only seen some… six MCU movies and most of them contained a lot of tedious and irrelevant mentions of other MCU characters. These scenes and moments brought me out of the film and drastically reduced my potential enjoyment. Every time, I felt less engaged and less willing to believe in the fictional reality of the movie.
If the MCU-ness of it all is distracting people from their enjoyment of an MCU film, they’re going to mention the MCU-ness of it all in their review.
Yeah, but if what you just wrote was the review of a movie, would you think it’s a good review? That’d be like a review of West Side Story being “It sucks, it’s a musical.” Some folks don’t like musicals, and find it an annoying and repetitive genre, but even if you’re one of those people, that isn’t a good review.
Does “Marvel” count as a genre now? Because it’s entirely possible for someone to enjoy superhero movies without caring for how the MCU has been handling things lately, much like someone could have been a huge fan of movie musicals while simultaneously bemoaning the bloated over-produced messes they had become by the late 60s (which wound up hurting the genre so much that it went from the premiere form of cinema spectacle ever since sync sound was invented to a niche interest that has a couple hits every decade or so).And in any case, this review isn’t remotely like “it sucks, it’s a musical.” It made a couple allusions to the bigger machine behind it all (and given that the film explicitly invites viewing things through this window more than any other MCU product to date, that’s an entirely fair thing to observe and comment on), but still mostly talks about the film itself and wound up giving it a B.Calling out an element of a film as not working, or mentioning the things that draw attention to themselves, is not unfair criticism.
You’re taking my response to Fiona out of context. Her issue was the cinematic universe aspects of these movies, and while I don’t think that Marvel films are their own genre, studios trying to craft cinematic universes is a widespread enough phenomenon with sufficiently established conventions that it should probably be regarded as a subgenre, at the very least. If, like Fiona, you don’t like those conventions—the mid- and end-credit stingers, the name-drops and references to events in other movies, the fan service cameos and Easter eggs, the idea that there’s a larger story to which the movie you’re watching is contributing—you’re not going to like them whether they’re coming from Marvel, Sony’s Venomverse, or your guy Zack Snyder. To people who don’t enjoy those conventions, they probably seem as artificial as people stopping in the middle of a realistic scene to do a song-and-dance number, with non-diegetic orchestral accompaniment. Some people enjoy that artifice, some people don’t.As for the rest of it, if you really love Dowd’s review that much, I’m happy for you that it satisfied your needs. I’ve just noticed a way in which these recent reviews—positive and negative—have fallen into a rut, and hope that calling attention to it encourages the reviewers give it some thought and try some fresh approaches. Not sure why you’re so threatened by that idea that you keep on replying to my comments (to champion stagnation, I guess?), but you do you.
My point is that the reviews being in a rut is a reflection of the material being reviewed, and your solutions seem to more or less boil down to “people who find the current state of the franchise more objectionable than I do shouldn’t be reviewing it,” which does nobody any favors.And no, disliking it in the MCU doesn’t mean someone has to dislike it everywhere else. The Venomverse hasn’t escalated to the point of absurd stakes or narratives five films deep in three different directions, and the Snyderverse (“my guy”?) imploded a while ago. There’s clearly degrees to which this sort of thing can be effective, and approaches that work or don’t work: one only has to look at all the failed attempts to copy it, or classic examples like the Universal monsters or Toho kaiju films that reached similar levels of inter-connectivity through different methods.I’m not championing stagnation. I’m championing a reviewer’s ability to call out stagnation when they see it, and the bizarre testiness some MCU fans have when even a single critical line dares draw attention to it in an otherwise-positive review, like this one.
Your solutions seem to more or less boil down to “people who find the current state of the franchise more objectionable than I do shouldn’t be reviewing it,” which does nobody any favors.That’s blatantly untrue. I never suggested that anyone shouldn’t be reviewing movies because I disagree with them. I didn’t suggest any solution other than a) the existing reviewers should distill the objections that they keep repeating in every MCU review into a thinkpiece, and b) they should challenge themselves to write the next review differently, not relying on arguments used in (a), that have become crutches and shorthand that make the reviews lazy and formulaic. Seek out new angles to approach the topic, and new ways to express their opinions. It’s fairly standard procedure for a writer in a rut (and you’ve never bothered to argue that these reviews aren’t in a rut). It doesn’t mean or imply the writer should change their opinion of the work reviewed, or cast it in a more positive light. If what I meant to say is that they should stop being mean to Marvel and find some nice stuff to say, I wouldn’t have any problem saying that. I’m not, and I haven’t.Indeed, I think—and you see it if you read the distillation of Dowd’s review in the ranking article—that Dowd should probably have been more negative in his review of this movie than the B-grade or repetitions of “there’s some fun to be had” suggest. I don’t care if the review is positive or negative (I tend to enjoy Dowd’s writing even if I disagree with his opinions) I just wish the review was less generic and more informative.You say you’re not championing stagnation, but your attitude seems to boil down to that because you find the movies stagnant, why shouldn’t the reviews be stagnant, too? However, that’s not how writing or criticism work. The quality of the review does not have to match the quality of the thing being reviewed. Formulaic writing isn’t the appropriate response to formulaic filmmaking.As for the the other stuff, again, my response was to someone else’s objections about cinematic universes. Unless that’s a sock puppet account you control, it wasn’t a response to your objections to the MCU, which are different. Since you’re different people.
It’s not a nested thought between points. The first three sentences of the paragraph, of which you quoted the middle sentence, combine to form a linear narrative progressing from A to B to C.
Is it wrong though? The Marvel formula is usually the worst thing about Marvel movies – cramming in the extended universe was easily the worst thing about Shang-Chi.
It’s not wrong. It’s just that nerds, somehow not receiving the memo that the favorite characters/stories they used to get teased for liking are now culturally dominant, still get defensive if someone casts any sort of analytical eye towards their quality or the corporate machine humming under their hood.
The teenage fangirls who were sitting behind me disagree. I never would have expected squeals of excitement over Wong… 😆
buddy, you chose to read it in that tone!
bootlicker alert. Marvel fanboys remind me of the kids who start freaking out bc they like mcdonalds in supersize me and that idiot says it’s unhealthy. Like wow you based your identity on the most massive entertainment property around…cool. Really cool.
There was somebody on one of these boards who compared MCU movies to sports, which is still the best analogy I’ve seen in terms of people’s personal investment in these ubiquitous, repetitive movies. Ironically, he didn’t intend it as a critique – he thought people were obligated to give the MCU and sports a try, and it was dumb if they didn’t. It was all very, as the kids say, basic.
It’s like it’s a comic movie review by AA Dowd! Dowd is still a good writer and all, but this is his shtick. =)
Wow, reviews of MCU movies talk about MCU movies? That’s crazy.
Ah there it is. For a moment I was worried this MCU comments section wouldn’t contain someone feeling attacked by an acknowledgement of the financial/business side of the movies they enjoy.
There’s something fun about reading reviews written within the confines of info embargoes. Media reviews already have to be careful about discussing content without spoiling major moments, leaving discussion somewhat vague. But embargoed content? Reviews become whispy, airy. People are already excited for the film, so reviews aren’t necessary for Marvel’s marketing arm. But I’m sure if more could be said, the review would drive up even more excitement due to assurances about things. As it stands, this well written review can simply be distilled down to, “If you already like this, you’re sure to like this.”
Being averse to spoilers, I rather prefer this. I don’t read reviews to learn in advance what’ll happen; I read them for vague generalities like what’s the film about, what sorta tone does it have, did the reviewer enjoy it, etc.
That’s all the Marvel/comic book films at the moment though. I kind of feel bad about the reviewers, what can they really say which hasn’t been said before.
Just want to say the “minor spoiler” warning at the top was a classy move, and is much appreciated.
Meh not interested unless Topher Venom and Rhino Giamatti are involved.
Very bold of you to assume Tom Hardy and Topher Grace aren’t CC’d into an email chain between Marvel/Disney/Sony execs right now debating how fast they can push out a Venomverse comic to adapt.
NGL I know it was executed *badly*, but I *loved* Topher Grace as Brock/Venom. Listen. Venom is *dumb*. I love Venom, but he’s *dumb.* Eddie Brock OG is a musclebound loudmouth with sleazy ethics who ends up screwing his own career but blames Spider-Man for it. He’s perfect meathead can’t acknowledge his screwup takes it out on somebody else.Eddie Brock is a WIENER.So you cast skinny Topher Grace and people say “he’s not big enough, Eddie Brock is a jock! Venom is huge!” and it’s like… nah, Eddie Brock is a LOSER. Topher Grace played him as a sleazy wiener loser. It almost makes more sense for the extra-pathetic Topher Brock to fully embrace the symbiote. And guess what, once the costume is on, it has all sorts of extra CGI mass and muscle. Now, all he does is find Sandman, team-up, and die. He doesn’t do anything cool, there’s no story there, etc. We all know the bs behind the scenes that forced Venom into the flick.But Topher wasn’t the problem. =)
I like Spider-Man 3 in general, it’s a big dumb fun mess of a movie. I wish most blockbuster movies were still made with that energy, packing in as many ideas they can and not worrying about setting up a sequel. And I do like the movie’s take on Brock being a dark mirror to Peter. I’m very aware Raimi didn’t want to Venom/Brock but I thought he did it well.
I’ll say this about the Ben Affleck Daredevil: It’s not great. The director’s cut improves it, but still ends up a nu-metal music video. I nonetheless enjoy it.Holy shit do they throw EVERYTHING into it though. They plow through like, four movies worth of material.
Thank you! Topher’s Eddie also works way better as a dark mirror to Peter than a muscle bound Eddie ever would.
It was a good concept to make Eddie a dark version of Peter, the way that Venom is a dark version of Spider-Man. (Though I do wish they’d kept Brock as a writer rather than a rival photographer.) I think with a few tweaks and some time for the character to actually develop, you could have had an all-time Spider-Man villain there.
Absolutely. No need to rehash the SM3 post-mortem; there’s too much crammed in there to work. So many interesting threads…!
Agreed. And listen, Topher Grace also would have been pitch perfect casting for Peter Parker. So making him the sleazy wiener loser to foil Tobey Maguire’s innocent wiener loser was great.
The movie was bad and the character was bad, but I’m fully behind you on Topher Grace not being to blame.
For a while, the movie remains in the charmingly low-key register of Holland’s previous two solo adventures in the suit, which at their best played like teen comedies with some middling superhero action running in their margins. The stakes here feel similarly scaled to the divided priorities of an adolescent Avenger; college admission woes are as pressing as any Manhattan rumble.[perks up, half gets out of seat]Will Tom Holland ever get a Spider-Man movie that’s all his own? His run in the role has been categorized by looming mentor figures and larger MCU maintenance; if Homecoming (and, to a lesser extent, Far From Home) doubled as Iron Man movies, this one feels like half a Doctor Strange story, adding a skirmish in the Inception-ish mirror dimension to an already crowded two-and-a-half hours of plot and spectacle.[dejectedly slumps back down]Such cruel irony that we finally have a perfectly cast Spider-Man who is more than capable of carrying the franchise on his own in an era when telling straightforward Spider-Man stories is passe and extended universe synergy is in vogue. I know the whole point of the deal bringing Spider-Man back into the Marvel/Disney fold is extended universing—Sony gets to keep all the movie $$$ while Disney is free to use the character in all their other properties—but c’mon, let the kid have his own adventures. I’m also questioning Marvel Studios’ strategy of slotting Dr. Strange into Tony Stark’s unofficial role of multi-franchise ambassador. Cumberbatch himself can be charming and charismatic at RDJ’s level, but Cumberbatch as Strange is…just kind of a dick?
Such cruel irony that we finally have a perfectly cast Spider-Man who is more than capable of carrying the franchise on his own in an era when telling straightforward Spider-Man stories is passe and extended universe synergy is in vogue. I know the whole point of the deal bringing Spider-Man back into the Marvel/Disney fold is extended universing—Sony gets to keep all the movie $$$ while Disney is free to use the character in all their other properties—but c’mon, let the kid have his own adventures.
Word. To me, there’s something about the parallel dimensions/multiverse hook that the MCU has gone all-in on that leaves me unenthused (I know, I know, I’m sure that means Disney is doomed now). I can’t put my finger on it, but having the Avengers show up in each other’s movies was exciting while the idea of multiple Lokis or Irons-Men or whatever just seems bloated. Yes, I am fun at parties.
Then again in THIS particular case, I might check it out to see Defoe and Molina ham it up.
i also think there’s diminishing returns. like, 10 years ago it was fun that 4 characters from different movies came together for a big movie (avengers), then 5 years ago it was fun that so many characters from other movies came together in a random captain america sequel (civil war)…and now every mcu movie and tv series is a mega crossover every time. at a certain point it goes from ‘why aren’t the superheroes hanging out and helping each other?’ to ‘are there any actual human beings in this universe?’
and now every mcu movie and tv series is a mega crossover every time
In what way is this remotely true? The last FIVE mcu properties have contained no more than one single core Avenger, or zero.
Shang-Chi-zeroEternals-zeroLoki-only the one who is the pointFalcon-only the one who is the pointWandaVision – only the two who are the point
well you’re also deliberately skipping hawkeye there, which is not only a direct continuation of the other movies, it’s also re-incorporating the netflix stuff, including black widow stuff, setting up a new version of an older character AND introducing a different new character who’s going to get their own series…but i digress.also my point wasn’t necessarily about ‘containing core avengers’ either, not sure where you got that from. my point was they’re all mega crossovers:shang-chi crosses over with iron man 3, with a literal main character, and has a stinger incorporating many ‘core avengers’. though chi is the one that works the best on its own.eternals – they’re constantly talking about thanos, the plot of the movie doesn’t exist without thanos snapping/unsnapping.loki – i guess yeah, its about loki doing loki stuff. probably the most truly self-contained of the lot. falcon/winter solder – don cheadle was quite literally nominated for an emmy for his appearance, it also sets up julia louis-dreyfuss. wandavision – has characters that cross over with the ant man AND thor movies.does my point make a little more sense now? it’s not special anymore it’s complicated and convoluted (to me).
The interesting thing about hawkeye is it’s my favorite of the D+ shows (it is by far the most consistent), and I definitely like it more than Shang chi or the eternals. If this is how they want to spin off and have cameos going forward I’m all for it
The question is though, do Woo and Darcy work in WandaVision if you haven’t seen Thor and Ant-Man. Because the answer is yes and you’re grasping at straws with your complaint. They have different functions and do not reference their previous appearances. It’s literally just to flesh out a larger world.
I get the idea the MCU has tried to incorporate humanity more in their recent projects for the above reason – the Eternals was about what humanity teaches robotic beings (or what have you), with a prominent human character; Shang Chi had one of the more prominent human characters with the Awkafina role and only had a crossover toward the end of the film; WandaVision and Falcon and the Winter Soldier also, with varying degrees of success, tried to focus more on the consequences of superheroes and supervillains for everyday people. I think they must know their big crossover days are done due to the exit of some of their highest profile figures. The crossovers here seem like more of a specific, one-time nostalgia fest for people who loved the Raimi movies (and I guess those who liked Andrew Garfield).
yeah but the only reason they’re courting that nostalgia is because they’ve already teamed spider-man up with everyone else they could within universe haha.it’s not so much that i need them to focus on the ‘humanity’ (which i think they bungled so hard in eternals i wasn’t even on their side by the end of the movie) it’s just that there’s now so many super-characters, and they’re all inter-connected with all these other super-characters, that i’m just, frankly, getting tired.the aspect of these movies that used to excite me now kind of makes me roll my eyes and feel like i’m being given more homework. it used to be ‘wow i can’t wait to see how this all comes together’ to ‘god it just never ends does it’. i also know it’s my problem! i’m not asking them to change it i think i’m just hitting a wall.
Yeah but again, much like Woo and Darcy, these aren’t things that require seeing all the films. It’s obvious that you are not someone who watches 100% of their content but a lot of fans do. So it sounds like your complaint isn’t about “needing to do homework” your issue sounds like you realize Darcy and Woo are from elsewhere, you don’t have the interest to watch other stuff they’re in, and therefore feel I guess jealous that you don’t get to enjoy the additional layer in the same way more versed fans do. I insist you reeeeally don’t need to see Thor or Ant-Man to enjoy WandaVision so is it just FOMO?
Nobody is forcing you to do “homework” but yourself.
Just speaking purely as a fan, if you don’t think about the corporate and contractual obligations behind these appearances, it’s just familiar characters showing up in other characters movies/shows. They are comic book movies, and if this was a comic you wouldn’t even think twice about any of these cameos. It’s just the fact that every BTS sneak peak of who might be in what becomes a major story.
It certainly ruined “What If?”
Poor writing ruined What If.
We have now gotten three spider-man movies where spider man is essentially a secondary character if them. I know people love to hate on the AG, ASM movies, and rightfully so with the second one, but that first movie is out of all the spider man movies a PP/SM is the main character and focus out of all of them.
Please use more abbreviations in your posts – it’s like having a puzzle section in the comments section…
The backlash that the Garfield movies got, especially the “Why are we doing this again? Why do we need to see Uncle Ben die yet again?” critiques, seem to have stuck in how they have not kept the character in larger settings ever since.
Some of the leaks I’ve read suggest Strange is not in as much of the flick as the trailers would have you believe. Buuuuut yeah. I love Holland, I love both his Peter and Spidey. He’s great. But we haven’t gotten a straightforward Spidey movie. Second time I watched FFH I was like… yeah but couldn’t we just be in NYC web-slinging instead of messing with Stark death drones and glasses? If Holland is sticking around after this, I really hope however many movies he still does are way more Spidey-centric.
Spider-Man 4 is already in the planning stages plus there’s a contractual MCU team-up movie that goes with it. Also, the end of Venom: Let There Be Carnage teased Spider-Man big time for a Venom 3.
Holland is going to hoover up that Sony/Disney $$$ until…..the late 2040’s, maybe?
That’s the worst name I ever heard.
id like Spider-Man in Venom 3 but did you see the No Way Home post credits…? Doesn’t seem like that’s the direction that thread is going at all, unfortunately.
I sort of agree, but what low-key Spider-Man story works in the arm race of modern superhero cinema/event movies? We’ve currently got an entertaining street-level Hawkeye (and kind of Daredevil roster heavy) show and a Moon Knight one on the way.
I love Marvel’s street-level stuff and was a bit disappointed we were straight out of the gates on to high-tech/superscience car tossing and sky portals, and while I’d love a movie which is primarily Spider-Man stopping The Chameleon from robbing banks, I think audiences generally are past it.
have you seen the movie yet? I felt the same as you about Homecoming and Far From, but i finally feel like we’ve got a real, earthbound Spidey in the MCU (instead of Tony Stark’s Pal: IRONBOY)
of course, a sizable portion of I09 commenters are now clamoring for Spider-Man 4: Dark Symbiont Wars!!1! … so we’ll see what happens.
Well… Tony kind of was too. He just had a much better origin movie.
By the way Dafoe is not a Oscar winner.
I believe this was Dowd’s way of respecting the spoiler embargo but confirming the rumours that Kraven the Hunter will appear played by Dame Judi Dench.
Off-topic, Curmudgahideen, but I was reading a Medium piece the other day from back in 2016 about the naming conventions of the ‘Fast and Furious’ series, and it quoted you (not by username, but it links to the article) talking about how ‘2 (blank) 2 (other blank)’ has become a standard AV Club joke. Just wanted you to know in case you weren’t aware of your moment of recognition.https://medium.com/@AdamRRowe/the-anti-logic-of-the-fast-furious-naming-scheme-embodies-what-makes-the-movies-great-745fa8150b6a
Thanks! Strange to see myself being quoted as an AV Club authority
OF COCK
dafoe is an oscar winner in the alternate universe that goblin comes from.
Well, he should be.
I know I’m in a minority here, but I couldn’t disagree more about the Webb Spidey movies. The first was a better origin movie than Raimi’s and the second, though certainly not great, was nonetheless substantially better than S3 and world’s better than the MCU’s two trainwrecks. Live action Spider Man movies: 2, Amazing, 1, Amazing 2, and the rest suck.
Unfortunately this movie has muscled out every other movie that has been released in the last few weeks, several of which I wanted to see. It’s showing on nearly every screen within a 50 mile radius of my house (except for a couple of art house theaters). My only other option is Nightmare Alley, which fortunately I want to see.It’s not that I don’t like Spiderman or Marvel, I love them both, and have for the last 50 years. But there is only so much one needs of this. It’s just SO MUCH, and I resent a bit that it reduces my opportunities to see other things. (Please note this post is not meant to denigrate anyone who has a higher capacity for Marvel.)
Hey, everyone! Check out this person denigrating anyone who has a higher capacity for Marvel!
At this point it isn’t a higher capacity for Marvel, it’s a higher tolerance for repetition.
It’s the same where I move, literally every other movie is being replaced. I was gonna see Green Knight, but it was only matinees this week and then gone. Can’t stop the spider-signal I guess.
I was at home watching ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ on DVD and it morphed into ‘No Way Home’ halfway through!
i’m actually more impressed that a movie that came out in july was still playing at all.
It started here a week ago. Limited release movies come out at weird times in small markets.
“From the Spider-Verse tumbles a sinister five of Sam Raimi and Marc Webb villains”I’m very excited for this movie, but does it seem insane to anyone else to stop at five when Spider-Man has such an iconic association with fighting a Sinister Six? They couldn’t have an alternate version of Mysterio or the Vulture pop in for the final group shot or something?
I’m surprised they don’t have Keaton’s Vulture show up, or something.
Or why not have both Vulture and Birdman both show up to duke it out for avian supremacy?
Emma Stone can then pull double-duty as Gwen Stacy and Birdman Junior Birdwoman, too!
Also, she channels Cruella for no real reason other than clothing bombs.
It makes me wonder if there was a draft of the screenplay somewhere out there that did include Keaton, and/or introduced Kraven the Hunter.
Ah well. Maybe in some other universe.
It turns out the Sinister Sixth was … peer pressure.
It makes sense when you think about it as “one villain from each of the pre-MCU movies.”
True fact: I handled this by being unable to count to 6 during the movie, and kept thinking “It’s the Sinister Six! They really did it!”
The original Spider-Man was clever, but the CGI was so fake that it never gave the feeling of flight, or swing. Doc Ock’s arms were a big step forward, but they kept the Spider-Graphic the same. The new series has intentionally made Spidey’s suit look like bad CGI despite that the Black Panther suit shows they know how to make the darn things look like they exist in 3D space (even if they can’t resist making the bodies do things that bodies can’t do and think it’s a “isn’t this cool” instead of “isn’t this fake looking” moment). Also: What is with EVIL CLOUDs? Why do comic book screenwriters think the scariest thing in the world is a purple or green cloud? “Fear of the unknown” I’m sure they say, but it’s clearly just laziness.
Doc Ock in this movie: Peter I have to return to my dimension. (sees Marisa Tomei as Aunt May) Wait. Hold on.
Why do comic book screenwriters think the scariest thing in the world is a purple or green cloud? “Fear of the unknown” I’m sure they say, but it’s clearly just laziness.Well, humans are biologically programmed to be wary of weird looking clouds. It’s the whole evolutionary “run away from bad weather that can kill you” thing. It can be lazy screenwriting, too.
so you attribute the evil clouds in Rise of the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern to fear of tornadoes? Veddy interestink
so you attribute the evil clouds in Rise of the Silver Surfer and Green Lantern to fear of tornadoes? Veddy interestinkSure. Some writer looks up and sees a great big scary-goddamn storm cloud with creepy colors and says, “Hey, that’s scary, I can use that.” Utilizing some elemental human fear is a really useful writing shortcut, and a hell of a lot more likely to work than trying to come up with something new that might work or might just look silly.
I mean, do you think the Fantastic Four movie team could’ve done Galactus without it being absolutely ridiculous? It would’ve looked like this guy. Better to turn him into a scary planet-eating cloud.
That is a seriously well done Galactus in Hawaii look. He has Silver Surfer surfing around him at the top and the wherewithal to wear sunglasses under his mask which is both practical in blocking the sun and makes him look cooler.
The little Silver Surfer is inspired.
“People won’t accept Kirby’s amazingly cool Galactus design on the big screen. Make him a cloud instead! Everyone likes clouds!”
“Be shaped like a cloud, ya spooky cloud, don’t be shaped like a rabbit.”
That was a pretty hilarious video
“I hope you brought rubbers…because a storm is coming!”
“I hope you brought french letters, because I’m gonna teach you how to spell amor!”
Double darn these pajama heroes!
wow this is some of the bravest turd polishing I’ve seen on this site in years. kudos
Is Uncle Ben the “cackling” Oscar-winner? Willem Dafoe ain’t got a statue.
“
Will Tom Holland ever get a Spider-Man movie that’s all his own?”
It helps to think of the MCU Spidey films as the movie version of Marvel Team Up.
The first one is Spider-Man/Iron Man, the second is Spider-Man/Nick Fury, and this one is Spider-Man/Dr. Strange.
I think Tom Holland’s Spidey works in-part because of the wider MCU world. Having those authority figures pushing him one way or another has allowed him to act like a teenager in a way the previous iterations couldn’t. I don’t get the whole “Spider-Man is a secondary character in his own movies” thing. He isn’t, the whole thrust of the first two movies were about his story and his choices. Homecoming is all about how he’s impatient and pushing against the restrictions placed on him and trying to prove himself as a grown-up superhero. But he’s still, in part, playing at being a superhero until the finale. Far From Home is the inverse, when he’s gotten all that grown-up responsibility he wanted in Homecoming, but having that weight on your shoulders can kind of suck and sometimes you just want a damn break. Learning that those grown-up (superhero) responsibilities can’t just be shrugged off even when you don’t want them or they’re inconvenient is another step in growing up.
Those coming-of-age stories don’t work if you don’t have Tony Stark or Nick Fury for Peter to push against.
And when he just says “Fuck it” and tries to go back to how things were before, he realizes it’s not that simple. He’s changed and grown, and wiping everyone’s memory would undo all of that growth, for better or worse.
On the other hand, Aunt May is a much more interesting character than Iron Man or Nick Fury, and an interesting part of the Spider-Man character is how Peter’s need to help people conflicts with his need to be a good kid. The MCU doesn’t really do secret identities, so they sidelined Aunt May and replaced her with a couple of overexposed superguys. They also decided that Spider-Man needed a high-tech suit, which is fine (we all loved the 90s Spider-Man cartoon) I guess.
Whether Aunt May is more interesting than Iron Man or Nick Fury is debatable, but the conflict that could focus just on Aunt May vs Spider-Man have kind of been done to death, don’t you think? Either Aunt May doesn’t know Peter is Spider-Man, so you have the bog-standard rehash of “Secret Identity getting in the way of Family Obligations”. Or Aunt May knows Peter is Spider-Man, in which case it’s probably going to be a rehash of “killjoy supporting character tries to convince the protagonist not to do the thing in the title of the movie”. Or, Aunt May knows Peter is Spider-Man and accepts it, but wants him to be a kid, too, which ends up with all sorts of lopsided priorities. “I know you saved 183 people from dying, but you missed your Algebra final and we just can’t have that, mister!”
I’m sure a really great writer could find a way to tell those stories that doesn’t bore us to tears, but they aren’t interesting or compelling in themselves because for the most part they’ve been beaten to death. In superhero stories, in spy stories, in knockoff superhero stories, and so on. There are only so many places you can take that, and the beats are all the same.
By putting Peter in a larger superhero universe with mentors and would-be bosses that are a part of that world, it allows Peter to deal with larger issues and make bigger decisions and bigger mistakes. It’s no accident that he screws up big in both Homecoming and Far From Home, and that in the former Iron Man has to clean up his mess and in the latter he does it himself. And yeah, I like that the MCU hasn’t really messed with secret identities for pretty much all of its heroes aside from Spider-Man. There’s a freedom to that that avoids a lot of the kind of tired stuff I mentioned before and dodges the “nobody can recognize me when I put on a little domino mask” stuff. (I love the Ant-Man and the Wasp line, “Baseball caps and sunglasses aren’t a disguise, Hank! We just look like us at a baseball game.”) As for Spider-Man’s suit, that’s just a logical step. Even in a world where a teenager invents super-amazing, hyper-advanced webbing fluid and web-shooters, I always found the idea that a cash-strapped teenage boy also learned advanced sewing and costume-making and bought a few yards of really unique looking, form-fitting fabric to make the iconic Spider suit (and had to spend weeks or months in his room with a sewing machine to make it) to be pushing it. Previous movies just kinda glossed over that because they had to (can’t have Spider-Man spend the whole movie in a suit that looks like what a teenager would realistically accomplish), but in the MCU it makes perfect sense that Tony Stark would make a cool suit for him. And of course Tony would over-engineer the ever-loving shit out of that suit.
There’s a certain irony in critiquing a superhero story by saying that the beats are all the same. That’s kind of the nature of the genre. I don’t really care how Peter gets his costume and webbing, the enjoyment of the story is in his relationships with Aunt May, with his friends, and ultimately with Spider-Man. Homecoming got that, which made Iron Man superfluous – he’s an answer to the questions I don’t find interesting. Far From Home had classic sequelitis and also a way less interesting father figure (it’s not even the real Nicky Fury).
I may have said this before, but I think this Spider-Man film series is the only one to actually nail the idea of “responsibility” as a theme, and having adult mentor characters around for Peter to bounce off of helps to drive it home. Just what level of responsibility is appropriate for a kid this young to have, powers or no? What is his responsibility to his mentors? What is theirs to him? Having Peter be part of a bigger superhero world, rather than just a friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, lets the films explore the consequences of his sometimes (naturally) childish actions.
He needs an authority figure. The authority figure doesn’t need to be an Avenger.He’s a high school student. He has plenty of authority figures in his life.
He needs an authority figure. The authority figure doesn’t need to be an Avenger.He’s a high school student. He has plenty of authority figures in his life.That doesn’t work, though, because then it becomes a classic (and fairly stupid) mismatched priorities issue. Like, “Peter! Why were you late to band practice!!” “Well, because I was saving the lives of 149 people.” It’s either the done-to-death secret identity thing (How do I balance life with being a secret superhero?) or it’s people who KNOW and are willfully stupid about it, “Peter, I know you were just saving the lives of hundreds of people, but you STILL need to study for your Algebra test!” Having superhero authority figures changes the equation. In one case, it’s Tony Stark trying to get him to slow down, and in the next it’s Nick Fury trying to make him step up. Both of those are way more interesting that trying to keep Aunt May from finding out he’s Spider-Man or trying to fight a bad guy while still making it to his final exam in Chemistry, or whatever.
But i think those authority figures loom so large over the story, the question is why is this kid doing this?In a universe where Spidey is the only hero of course he will battle the villain out of obligation(Goblin) or personal connection( ock). But in the MCU where the villain’s gripe is with Tony Stark, and Peter is only at risk because of his connection to the authority figure or accidental, the story bends over backwards to make Peter care( he didn’t want the watch) or the authority figure ill-responsible( Vulure stealing right from under his nose).None of these arcs really say anything about Spider-Man the way Raimi did. Now yeah it would/ could be repetitive but also it feels like the MCU doesn’t have anything new to say about Peter so this is just an exercise in contract rights.
But i think those authority figures loom so large over the story, the question is why is this kid doing this?See, that’s part of why I think it works. He’s being a hero because he wants to be a hero. It’s not because he has to be, he’s not forced into it, he’s not the only superhero in this universe, he has an actual choice. He’s Spider-Man because he feels he needs to be, not because the world has forced it on him.
Quoting because it’s hard to see who’s replying to what on Kinja:> Homecoming is all about how he’s impatient…> Far From Home is the inverse, when he’s gotten all that grown-up responsibility he wanted in Homecoming…And this new one continues that arc thematically so well. He finally realizes and accepts how weighty responsibility is, and almost literally leaves childhood behind.
As fascism approaches, people care about things like this. OK.
People can focus on more than one thing.I’ve gorged on politics over the last twenty years. I wanna be able to have fun, too, dammit. That’s what we’re fighting for; we want to make sure EVERYONE can also enjoy themselves.
People care…about movies? Yeah dude, art persists, entertainment continues to entertain. Walking and chewing gum simultaneously is baked into the human condition.
Think of how much closer fascism got in the time it took you to comment. Maybe fascism is your fault.
Won’t someone please think of the fascism?
Just a friendly reminder that every 60 seconds an African Child eats a fascist. #DoTheyKnowItsChristmas
It’s cool you took time out of your busy fascism-fighting schedule to post on the avclub.
He gets a 10 minute break just like the rest of us pal. Some of us go out back to smoke cigarettes but the better of us scold strangers on the internet.
Where’s that JLaw gif when I need it…
these kinds of comments rule. just a dude who read an entire review of a movie through gritted teeth, furious. i wonder if there’s a guy on a fascism website who’s so mad people aren’t talking about spider-man
Lots of angry comments on Stormfront from what I’ve seen.
Shouldn’t you be saying something snarky in the Slate comments, then? Splinter/beam, baby!
“I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.” Or, like, dance. Or watch a silly movie.I’ll fight fascism to its death, or even my own. Even alongside you. But fuck off, Comrade Pure.
Not that I’m saying commenting is ever a productive use of one’s time, but dropping by a Marvel movie review on a pop culture website to scold everyone for not paying sufficient attention to fascism seems like a particularly unproductive use of one’s time.
No no, you’ve all misinterpreted. He’s talking specifically about Spider-fascism, so it’s relevant.
He’s not, though. Spider-Fascist was a regular spider who got bitten by a radioactive, time-traveling Hitler, giving him the proportional cruelty and racist nationalism of a spider-sized fascist. He doesn’t reference that character at all!
It’s just as foretold in the classic parable: A thousand spiders, each working alone, may be smashed by a thousand shoes. But if you use webbing to tie a whole bunch of spiders together into a bundle, then you’ve got a weird gross mess of spiders for some reason, seriously, what the hell.
Holy fuck! What are you doing commenting on here then?
Dumbism is already here.
Lighten the fuck up.
So how does it feel having posted the dumbest possible take?
You seem fun.
I get you, I’m pretty pessimistic about the incipient fascist takeover, but we can still enjoy stuff. It’s not like we’re all in an MCU opium den, hiding from the world.
Maybe rag on all the centrists and shitlibs that all but welcome fascism and Nazism with open arms because they insist on supporting their brutal enforcers and wealth accumulation schemes that the enforcers protect. It’s always the majority of conciliatory moderates that let the monsters in.
And then go get trained the fuck up because we barely have 3 years to do so.
i’ve been (particularly and especially) depressed and pessimistic about the state of the world for the last few weeks. Or, more accurately – CHRONICALLY apathetic. Like, i really don’t think America’s gonna make it – no matter what i do – and i don’t see what the point of anything is.
But i really enjoyed this movie last night, with it’s silly CGI fight scenes, and the little thematic message in the center that – hey, helping people out DOES still matter, and it is, in fact, “my problem” that there’s people out their suffering RIGHT NOW, even if the world is going to end next week.But if it makes you feel any better, i’m sure any happy thoughts will dissipate soon enough.
It’s a story about what to do with power and the obligations we have to others. I think as fascism hovers movies like this are very important.
Hey man, I’m an Antifascist that does boots on the ground work in Portland.Its ok to enjoy a movie
Says the person caring about people’s opinions about a thing they think people shouldn’t care about.
So you’re the sperm that won? Wow!
Yeah, everything else needs to grind to a halt. Can I still go to work? Am I allowed to eat? Or is that not paying attention.
The AV Club may not be the right website for you.
Sure Jan.
In the absence of anything at all resembling REAL fascism, constant reminders that it’s just around the corner are super fun.
Reviews of Spider-Man stuff leave me feeling like I’m the only person in the world that likes the team up aspect of the MCU version. Will Spider-Man ever get a solo outing? YES! He had five of them already! Spider-Man, setting the 90s prevalence of Wolverine aside, has always been the ultimate buddy superhero, because he needs another person around to look up to and bounce quips off of, and I personally love how the MCU space has allowed him to have that. People keep talking like Parker was second billed in Homecoming, when Iron Man had like 7 minutes of screentime and only really showed up to help in the ferry aftermath. I dunno, maybe I’m just being contrary.
i’m kind of two minds about it.on one hand, on paper, i definitely think it’s cool that spider-man can pop over to dr strange’s house to say what’s up. it’s like a comic book! it’s fun! my problems stem from how much of spidey’s identity is tied specifically to tony stark, and how much of the movies are about that. he was only in homecoming for 7 minutes, but favreau was in it a lot, and a LOT of the movie was about his relationship with stark, and whether or not he’s an avenger, etc.it’s not necessarily bad overall, it’s just a different flavour of spider-man than i usually like.
on one hand, on paper, i definitely think it’s cool that spider-man can pop over to dr strange’s house to say what’s up. it’s like a comic book! it’s fun!Us diehards know that this ws not a new thing on paper or on Saturday Mornings:
The problem is it feels like anyone can put on that robo suit and fight crime. It robs spidey of his agency and his homemade hero USP. Plus it feels muddled. He’s got cutting edge tech but he still has to make his own web fluid when the teachers not looking? Oo repack his parachute manually like it’s GI issue from World War 2? And call me old school, I just think the Iron Spider legs look dumb and ugly.
Spider-Man: No Way Home does a pretty good job of not mentioning Tony Stark.
These movies all make hundreds of millions of dollars, so don’t worry, you couldn’t be more in the majority in enjoying them.
I also don’t at all buy the takes that Iron Avengers Spider is a problem. My entire life has been filled with the “traditional” Spider-Man story. It was plenty.
As I recall, Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse was universally loved by critics and fans alike.
So I don’t really see why we need to see Spider-man Live Action: Less Interesting Take on Into the Spiderverse here.
Actually, I’m with you on this. Especially after this movie (which, apart from a somewhat flabby/muddled mid-section, I really enjoyed, both for the incredibly energetic opening – that really maintains the momentum for much longer than it should – and for the surprisingly heartfelt beats in the finale, where it actually felt like things had stakes for the character(s) involved).This trilogy, really, has been more about Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends (including his non-powered ones!) and I’m ok with that. It’s really managed to make it feel like he lives in a vibrant, fully populated world, where… certain people… might just pop up and join his story (and it’s still his story) at any moment.
I just got back from a showing, and MAN is it going to be difficult to talk about this one for a few days until most people have caught up.
I totally agree – this was an absolute blast of pure fun, except for the parts where they ripped your heart in half.
I just watched Spider-Man 2 with the kids in preparation for this new one, and as great as Raimi’s film is, it takes so long to get going. You’re about 1/3 into the movie before Octavius puts on the robot arms and from that moment on it’s pure gold. But the first third is basically a sluggish drama about a kid who’s working two jobs to try and pay for college and can’t get up his nerve to get back together with his ex. I love that NWH hits the ground running (or web-slinging, as it were) and doesn’t really let up.It also, remarkably, turns the two-many-villains problem endemic to all kinds of 3rd entries in superhero franchises on its ear, serving these characters better than some of their original movies did. As much as cinephiles love trashing the Marvel movies as “not real film” or whatever, there’s a remarkable economy of storytelling to these things, not to mention stuff like combining three different franchises at once, or a 24-movie cycle whose emotional center is a talking racoon, is all stuff no one’s ever done before and they make it look easy. (And if it actually were easy, DC would have figured it out.)
I thought the bigger problem with the Homecoming and Far From Home is that they are movies about Teen Iron Man, not Spider-Man.
In the first movie, Peter gets this amazing new tech suit, loses it due to his recklessness, then has to prove himself without the technology (using only, um, his super powers) before he can re-earn his stripes and get some even better new tech.In the second, Peter is still adjusting to the vast power of his technological might, but does not properly appreciate its impact and gives it away. Then he has to fight against the very technology he discarded.These are Iron Man plotlines, not Spider-Man. Apparently, Marvel decided that after 5 Spider-Man movies, the easier route was to just make more Iron Man movies, but starring a kid this time! And No Way Home is just a shameless rip-off of Into The Spider-Verse. (Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy No Way Home, but Spider-Verse was clearly the superior movie.)
Honestly good. Save me from another round of Spider-Man No More.
I think the worst part for me is that Vulture and Mysterio are essentially Iron Man villains in the MCU and Spider-Man is just forced to clean up messes Tony made.
We essentially have three Iron Man movies, an Avengers movie (just including AoU here but Civil War could also count considering how the whole Accords thing played out with him admitting they were faulty but wanting to just make them go away and amend them later), and two Spider-Man movies that run on ‘Tony Stark made some bad decisions that create villains’.
After Killian, you’d think he’d have at least made some sort of database of people he fired that created revolutionary technology for him because EDITH definitely should’ve been able to identify Beck and everyone in the bar where Peter gave away the glasses. At the very least, Karen had the excuse of Peter not wearing her.
Now we finally have a film where Peter is the cause of the conflict but the antagonists are… the enemies of other Spider-Men. Could we at least get Gargan his Scorpion suit or bring in the Smythe and his Spider-Slayers (without just making him the second in command of Beck’s crew)? Maybe Kraven? The Other? Jackal? White Rabbit? Frog-Man? Hobgoblin? Doppleganger? Even Stilt Man, his armor was seen in the first season of Daredevil.
Also, Kate Beaton’s got a perfectly good Kraven script just lying around.
I’m 100% with you. I also think Spider-Man is in the no-win zone with certain reviewers at this point. If they had redone his origin and smaller scale movies, people would complain about it. Just look at the complaints about DC showing Thomas and Martha Wayne dying over and over again. I like that they skipped his origin and made him different than we had seen before. And I would gladly watch Holland in this role for another 6-7 years.
We’re really supposed to believe that Dr. Strange—who has previously guarded the time stone with his life—is going to use his powers willy-nilly so that he can somehow cause the entire world to forget Spidey’s real identity? I mean, that’s WW84-levels of silly plot contrivance. It’s right up there with Stark figuring out time travel in two moves, VIOLA!But then who gives a shit, right? I’m sure if this comment gets out of the grays there will be 10 people with 20 reasons why Strange would do something so stupid. The MCU is never wrong to its fans (not even when a coincidental rat is the strongest avenger).I know many would say a middling MCU movie warrants a B, but I think unless an MCU film rises above the fray—as with Ragnorok—the standard MCU rating should be a C. It’s always the same shit, and that’s what lots of people want, but in most every case the movies are perfectly mediocre.
So “glad” that astoundingly unattractive actress stole the role from the redhead minority. What is this? Another production of Annie?
These days, I check the runtime to see if I even want to see a movie. Ugh! Over 2 and 1/2 hours? I don’t get any extra value when a movie takes up a quarter of my waking hours. I know…..every scene is so important that they couldn’t possibly edit anything out. It’s a freaking comic book movie. It doesn’t need to drag on for this long.
You are only awake for 10 hours a day?
This review contains minor spoilers (including a revelation of the main villains) from the movie Spider-Man: No Way Home. yeah, Sony already let me know with their constant spoiling ads and trailers on social media!maybe there’s another villain, but just wish they would’ve just left it as Doc Ock as the spoiled surprise but have kept the other guys not revealed until the movie premiered. (kinda like what should’ve been done for Thor Ragnarok with Hulk’s appearance)
the cackle and crooked grin of a slumming Oscar winner….You’re referring to Willem Dafoe here. Dafoe’s never won an Oscar. Been nominated four times. Never won. How do you make an error like this in an article in 2021?
Odd bit on the villains. Keaton’s Vulture was outstanding and is still alive. Jake’s Mysterio was excellent. He dead, but also, he Mysterio, so maybe he not dead. Those are two kick-ass villains. Albeit I’ll grant you it’s been since RaimiSpidey2 since we had somebody outstanding.
You also have The Shocker and Michael Mando’s Scorpion tease. They could have put together a Sinister Six with just MCU villains. Tom Holland mentioned in an interview about a plan B idea involving Kraven if people like Dafoe or Molina didn’t agree to do the movie. I think all this multiverse stuff (and Dr. Strange) was a last minute decision based on certain actors signing on. The result is that they decided to not follow through with things they set up in previous films.
Keaton’s Vulture is so alive that I’m pretty sure he’s in a couple of frames of the Morbius trailer they ran before my showing, but fuck if I know what reality any of that is in.
They’re killing off Tomei, aren’t they? lololol
How else are they going to do Spider-Man: One More Day in the future?
the cackle and crooked grin of a slumming Oscar winner
Willem Dafoe has been nominated for an Oscar four times, but has yet to win one.Which is a travesty.
We all know Tobey and Andrew appear in this movie
But not playing who you think they’re playing!(Tobey is the Iguana and Andrew is Paste-Pot-Pete)
A Dowd B for a Marvel movie?I am so there!
A AA Dowd B eh?
Si!
I think the current lore is that Dowd only had two As to give, and he used them on his name
Oh, come on, you don’t think Jake Gyllenhaal qualifies as “a wonderfully hammy villain played by a world-class actor”?
How dare you suggest such a thing. Mysterio was not a VILLAIN. He was the greatest hero since Tony Stark, and Spider-Man murdered him. #JusticeForMysterio
I’m with Hannibal #mysteriowasright
Or Michael Fucking Keaton for chrissake who only played one of the best villains in the MCU
For what it’s worth, looks like you’ll get to see him again in the upcoming Morbius movie.
That assumes one watches it, and the trailers look 1996 terrible. Great, he looks like the comics! Oh, it’s Jared Leto and he flies like a sugar glider? lol sorry nevermind
Yeah, but Keaton wasn’t hammy. He underplayed his character to remarkable effect.
But can it possibly match up to the last time Spider-Man faced down so many villains at once?
I saw this back in 2012; it was….memorable.
The important thing is that you survived, hopefully to tell your grandchildren the tale of when the Green Goblin had dildos growing out of his shoulders.
the cackle and crooked grin of a slumming Oscar winnerAssuming we’re talking about Willem Dafoe here, I just looked it up, hoping you were right. But alas, despite 4 nominations, our boy has never taken home his own dumb little statue.
It only properly fulfills fan service if Nicholas Hammond appears as the 1970s tv Spider-Man
I would like Firestar and Ice Man to show up too.
Well, you’re one up on io9 whose headline to the article called it “Now Way Home”.Even if they changed it later, I know what I saw!(I also took a screenshot.)
“this one feels like half a Doctor Strange story”And that’s not a bad thing. I thought the Dr. Strange solo movie was OK, but I like him best when he’s working off someone else. His and Stark’s bickering in Infinity War were hilarious.
6 more hours until I finally get to see it. At this point I already know everything about the movie, but damn if I’m not still excited as hell.
One or two or three post-credit scenes?
They have the credits at the start and technically the whole movie is a post credits scene.
Two. Though technically, one.
1 mid-credit scene. There is a “post-credit” scene, but it’s just a traditional teaser for the next movie (like how Captain America 1 ended with an Avengers teaser).
I hope that at the end of the film, when all the dust has settled, Paul Giamatti turns up and says, “Hello? Russian supervillain the Rhino here. I come to be part of Sinister Six, da? Hello?” Then, after getting no response, he shuffles sadly off-stage.
He was up all night dyeing his underwear.
I saw the Raimi Spider Films as kid and I remember vaguely liking them but does anyone have nostalgia for them? The most prominent thing that I remember is that they were earnest in a way that Marvel films never are and I can’t see them even attempting to recapture that feeling.
This doesn’t even sound like a review of anything that has to do with characters or stories.
No spoiler but the complaint about having Tom spiderman carry a movie by himself instead of teaming up, the complaints about iron man jr and so on DO get addressed (and solved) in this movie
I saw this today. Spoilers below-…It never at any point feels like it’s own movie. It tries so hard to please the crowd, and where Avengers Endgame managed this well, this fails.I’m a huge Spidey guy but the MCU movies have just made me pine to rewatch the Raimi movies. These films never feel ‘lived’ in. New York is a green screen full of actors with CGI heads, who never feel like they’re acting together.There’s an interesting cameo early on in the movie which would work, if the actor was actually in the scene and it wasn’t hid CGI head.Garfield probably steals this.
“There’s an interesting cameo early on in the movie which would work, if the actor was actually in the scene and it wasn’t hid CGI head.”Out of curiosity, what are you referring to here? I saw it last night and loved it, and while I don’t think the “Portal” scenes equivalent to Endgame’s big one quite hit as high, the ending was just as brutal in its way as Infinity War’s was.
Matt Murdock was CGI. I noticed something not quite right, that uncanny valley feeling pretty early on.
I didn’t get that impression, but I’ll try to take a closer look next time. I guess given the extreme secrecy involved I could see them doing that.
There was a leaked image of the 4 of them sitting at the table and Charlie Cox was clearly there, so I don’t think that’s true. But in general it does bother me that all the backgrounds and environments seem to be CG. I agree, it does not feel like a real world.
Oh, I see the problem. That was Mike Murdoch, that’s why he looked weird.(If anyone’s response is “???”, look it up.)
I doubt that is true – his appearance was spoiled on Marvel spoiler boards long ago because he was spotted on set.
Oh I didn’t get that impression at all. His hair was different and he was a little older than we last saw in 2018 ofc, but still seemed very much flesh-and-blood Charlie Cox to me. I’ve spent countless hours staring at that man….I think I’d know….
SPOILER:
are you actually suggesting that theres so much going on in the movie you forgot Matt Murdock shows up? Because that is pretty funny and I kind of feel the same way.
No, I’m questioning the idea that CGI was involved in having an actor sit at a table. (which seems ludicrous and disproven)
Maybe because I’m not really invested in Spider-man, but I felt the opposite. Where I thought a lot of Endgame’s fanservice failed to land (not all by any means, but enough to get a little worn out with it all), I thought this did a good job of feeling like it’s own movie and being about Peter. I thought the fanservice was more earned and better integrated, on the whole.Unfortunately, I do think filming during COVID led to some especially conspicuous green screening.
He just looked weird because his hair was slicked back more than usual.
I loved it, I was pure emotion!!!
This movie is worth the hype because you are hyped up for such and such things that happen exactly as if you have imagined. At the same time, as a movie sans gimmicks, it really is hollow and overrated. As a matter of fact, all the four MCU movies since Covid share this same problem. I had a great time watching this in cinema. But back home, in retrospect , this is the weakest entry from the trilogy.
Willem has unfortunately never won an Oscar
Jesus, this isn’t even trying. Played by…. it’s not exactly clear? How the fuck did you not recognize Thomas Haden Church? The man looks like a living Frankenstein and has the benefit of being in Spider-Man 3. I know you hate your job, Dowd, so maybe it’s time to hang up your critical notepad and stop being the old man shouting at clouds.
The amount of fan service in this film was bordering on irresponsible. My audience applauded at literally every callback, cameo, and cloak. I had a great time in Endgame during the big moments, but those were fewer and mostly confined to the last half hour. In this movie it was every ten to fifteen minutes.I’ll probably watch it again in a smaller crowd to see if it that affects my opinion, but I was a little underwhelmed. It was fun, and I don’t think any characters were wasted exactly, but it still felt a little too full with everything going on. Not all of the big emotional beats hit like they were supposed to (Though one or two definitely did). Dowd’s B feels just right here.
The fan service in Endgame felt earned and worked. The fan service in this felt like it was dumped in it for teenagers to whoop and holler.Maybe i’m just getting older and more jaded. The ‘Something of a scientist’ myself line made my eyes roll.
huh. This was the only time i ever DIDN’T roll my eyes at audience applause at obvious fan service moments. I think i expected this to be a big corporate-synergy circle-jerk, and maybe it WAS… but man, did it ever work for me.
I hate watching movies like this with big crowds for this exact reason – I don’t want or get any enjoyment from crowds adding their own soundtrack to movies. Don’t want to hear people applauding, hooting and hollering, or really doing anything whatsoever. I almost never go see movies on opening weekends or even weeks for this reason.
I just watched it tonight and while I was extremely skeptical going in, I was absolutely blown away. It’s a really emotional movie all the way through. This review is obsessed with the corporate/multiverse synergy, which is a big part of the movie especially the marketing, but they just pull it off so well. I loved Homecoming, thought far from home was a bit disappointing, and this one stands up there with Endgame for me for balancing incredible character moments for basically every character, telling a complex story, and giving you plenty of fan service. I don’t want to overhype it, because I am very much a life long spider-man fan, but this is easily top 3 MCU movies
top 3 mcu movie for sure, AND knocked out Spiderverse for #1 Spidey movie. i was worried going back into the Spiderverse so soon was just going to be a way to placate Sony; to whatever degree it WAS, they sure made it work.
Can we talk about Charlie Cox CGI head now? Wth?
a slumming Oscar winnerI’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. Dafoe basically came back for free to ham it up in the sequel cameos, he was having so much fun. “Slumming” for Willem Dafoe would be Speed 2 and Boondock Saints.
*mild SPOILERS*
Can we all agree that, after this movie, the Cox is out in the open? The studios kept their use of Cox quiet, but now we can see how they’ve been using their Cox. We can all leave the theaters satisfied that we saw Cox, and we can look forward to more Cox in the future. Marvel doesn’t need to hide Cox from us anymore.
Why is nobody talking about how this was a CGI Cox?! Dude wasn’t even in the movie. They CGI’d his head in.
Everybody loves Chubby Cox
Really went all in on that pun, didntcha?
Yes.
Back when AV Club and the commenters used to be fun, and enjoyable, we used to do stuff like that.
Ah yes, the old AV Club days…OF COX.
You get it!(By it, I mean Cox)
Presumably the superior formatting would make the above drivel humorous?
Overstuffed & under-baked.
So here’s a question about how Morbius fits into Spidey’s universe…In the trailer we see a picture of Spidey on a wall saying “Murderer.” Morbius then says to a bad guy that he’s Venom. So is Venom in the same universe as Morbius and Spidey or not? I always thought he wasn’t after the end credits of Venom 2. That they got transported to the MCU Spideyverse.
By seemingly all accounts, Morbius and Venom are in the same universe, and it is not the MCU. Dunno about the Spiderman mural in the trailer, other than that Sony is probably champing at the bit to put him in one of these movies, and is just going to leave little easter eggs like that until he suddenly pops up in one. The end of this movie seems to rule out him appearing in Morbius, but I guess never say never.I also think the Michael Keaton appearance is just a gag, but again, who knows. Maybe Sony and Disney are cooperating more than we know.
Spoiler alert for the end of No Way Home that should clear up some of this.————————————————————————Venom does not appear in the actual film. He’s not part of the MCU and the whole thing was basically a troll. Venom is only in a post credit scene and he spends the entire time of the multiverse shenanigans at that resort he showed up in at the end of Venom 2 just asking questions about the heroes in the MCU. He disappears the same way all the other characters do, signifying that he was sent back to his home universe, without ever once actually interacting with any MCU characters. He somehow leaves behind a tiny blob of the symbiote, but that’s it.
Venom and Morbius are supposed to be in the same universe, but we can 100% say they are not in the MCU. It is very possible that Sony is going to be allowed to have their own Spider-Man as part of the deal to let Holland Spider-Man continue in the MCU, we’ll just have to see. Hopefully they don’t do the crap you see on the CW shows where they are constantly mentioning Batman but never allowed to show him
What bugged me about this (spoilers)…________________The whole premise of the spell is that it brings in only people who know Peter Parker is Spider-Man. There’s no reason is should have brought Brock/Venom, since Spider-Man doesn’t even exist in their world, let alone that they would know his identity.
Yeah I feel like they did it for no other reason than to troll the audience and generate the endless articles and threads speculating on characters moving to specific movie universes. Can’t say it wasn’t successful.
Yeah I’ve seen Venom 2 and NWH but seems like false advertising to show that Spidey mural in Morbius if he’s not gonna be there.
The symbiote being left behind in Mexico (I think?) was interesting. I don’t know if that’s just a fun teaser for fans or if it will actually lead to anything, but I liked it.
I saw this, and I thought it was really good. The thing is: it keeps its eye on the ball. No matter how many mini-adventures there are, or multiple peters (finding a new way to do the multiple spider-mans meme was adorable), the movie has one prevalent plot and it delivers on it. The other things serve that central plot. So it doesn’t matter how ADHD it gets (particularly because they pull out so many delightful moments, including Dr. Strange’s goatee shaper guard) because the movie has Peter, MJ, Ned, May, and Happy. Everyone else is ancillary to that small film and what happens with those people. I think this movie is going to be friggin huge $$$ and maybe put Omicron everywhere all by itself (yikes)…basically it just really delivers.
I feel certain this will be the biggest box office for a movie released in 2021, although not necessarily from 2021 tickets.
Yeah, Shang-Chi was good but this has real Civil War vibes in terms of really delivering on the crossover synergies. And I generally didn’t find the big fights to be totally incoherent, which is even better than the end of Civil War. Plus Marvel got all that for the low-low-price of it having basically no effect on the larger MCU (for all the “multiverse” talk other than the central conceit this is really not the kickoff for Kang)
I loved it too, really nailed the emotions and some of it I really didn’t see coming. I was never as sold on Holland until this movie, he just makes you really feel for him.
This movie brought me around on Maguire’s Peter Parker whom I have previously actively disliked.
Bring back Spoiler Space, NOW.
If it could be brought back for any movie, this is the one.
“a certain sentient storm of minerals (played by… well, it’s not entirely clear, even after a climactic desanding).”It’s… entirely clear he’s played by Thomas Haden Church? In voice form the whole time and in person after the de-sanding? Did you see a different cut than I did?
Much like Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Spider-Man No Way Home feels like Fan Service: The Motion Picture. Spider-Man (2002) is one of my favorite movies of all time. No Way Home knows that, and weaponizes my nostalgia. So while I liked NWH a lot, I can’t help but feel a little manipulated. Still, there’s a ton of good in it and despite Spider-Man’s world getting overblown by multiverses and nanotech (I still hate Iron Spider) it doesn’t forget that the theme of Spider-Man is self-sacrifice for the greater good.
Spoiler (-ish):For those wishing for Spidey to get his own g-d movie for once without all the guest stars and mentors, after the climax of this one, you’ll probably get your wish in Spider-Man 4: Home Alone.
This movie is hard to grade. On one hand, the fan service moments worked for me (I am, after all, a fan) and I didn’t get bored once during the film; it kept me fully entertained throughout. One could argue that this is enough, that I shouldn’t ask for more, and that might very well be true.On the other hand, my god that script is bad! Sad scenes sandwiching comedic ones, questionable multiverse rules that are never satisfyingly explained (shouldn’t changing the fate of a character greatly affect his timeline?), a Doctor Strange spell that seem to have very different consequences than what was explained earlier…I think that Dowd is remembering the Raimi trilogy with pink tinted glasses (only the second film aged kind of well; the vfx aren’t the only thing that feel dated) but I’m still disappointed with what Watts did, and don’t feel very confident about his Fantastic Four. There will come a time where cameos won’t be enough to compensate for weak storytelling.
This was a frustrating movie. I loved getting Dafoe &
Molina back. I hate the convoluted magic spell that facilitates this.
Why do we need this when Into The Spider-Verse already did multiversal Spidey crossovers better?https://mattthecatania.wordpress.com/2021/12/18/spider-man-has-no-way-home-from-nostalgia/
Damn, a B from Dowd! You know this shit is solid! Or he’s getting soft in his old age ;PAnyway I really, really liked this movie. There were definitely some plot elements that could have been better written (Dr. Strange and Peter not setting up the spell properly in the first place and screwing it up just due to some talking; taking the villains home without any precautions), but the emotional beats really worked for me, and I think the movie did a great job in showing the innate goodness of these Spiders-Men.
The movie was balls-out great. Although, after it was all over it had me thinking about how it all affected the other Spidey universes once the reformed villains returned to their space and didn’t die as said villains. Like, imagine if those same movies came out today altered to their new continuities.Talk about lousy endings. 🤣
Dear guy from a few weeks (months?) ago on another Spider-Man thread. I was happy to be proven wrong about that cameo. It was fun.
Am I the only nerd who got a serious Doctor Who vibe from this movie?
People openly discussing spoilers in the comments of this review is absolutely the fault of The AV Club for not providing a spoiler space for this. Shame.
So did Strange’s spell unpublish Flash Thompson’s tell-all? Did it just make people forget or did it rewrite reality to remove all records and evidence of Spidey’s secret identity?